“Museu é o mundo.”
Hélio Oiticica
“O sertão está em toda parte.”
João Guimarães Rosa
Vegetal thinking and literature
Literature is, without a doubt, a privileged place to think about the relationship between humans and plants, for since the beginning literary works have risen plants to a very important rank. In so-called Western modernity, it was mainly romantic and symbolist authors who resorted to roses, flowers in general, trees, roots and other plant elements to express their feelings and ideas. However, Walt Whitman was certainly one of the first to give a real role to the natural world, very similar to what other writers on the 20th and 21st centuries would do. In Leaves of Grass, landscapes in the United States do not appear as a mere decorative element, but as reflection on the being in the world, opening up to various poetics and activism of the following century: high-modernists, beatniks, hippie Flower Power and ecologism, among other literary and existential avant-garde movements.
What I call vegetal thinking has no simple or definitive definition, but comprises at least four basic meanings. First, vegetal thinking would be what plants think. This is an elementary question in botany and philosophy today: does the green world think, and if so, what and how does it think? It is certainly not a question of thinking with words, but since before Aristotle, the question has been brought up as to whether plants have a “soul” (psyché), just like animals and, above all, like humans.
A second meaning for vegetal thinking would be what we think of plants: both scientifically and on a daily rapport, what we humans actually think about these living beings so close, but apparently so different from us. Although botany, as an autonomous discipline, dates back only to the 18th century – like so many other modern forms of knowledge –, the concern with the kingdom plantae already existed in ancient times, not to mention the various non-European origin cultures. Theophrastus wrote two important treatises around 300 BC: On the History of Plants and On the Causes of Plants. Let’s just say that, in the so-called Western world, vegetables were mostly seen only as sources of food and fuel, as providers of medicinal substances, as resources for housing and clothing, among other uses. That is, as mere useful objects, without a life of their own, respect-worthy.
In two other very particular senses, it is interesting to see how scientists and philosophers today, as well as fiction and poetry writers, develop innovative thinking about plants. Especially from the 20th century onwards, a vision of plants emerged (to refer the title of a brilliant novel by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida) no longer instituted on anthropocentrism or on the so-called zoocentrism, the biological centering on animal life. In this third (scientific-philosophical) and fourth (literary) recent significance for vegetal thinking, plants earn full existential autonomy, being considered in their intelligence and sensitivity.
To these four meanings of the expression vegetal thinking (in short: thought of plants, of humans in general about plants, of philosophers or scientists and of contemporary writers about them) adds a fifth one: what non-Western cultures think about plants, especially two that coexist in the Brazilian civilization space: the indigenous and the Afro-descendant cultures.
In the impossibility of developing the arguments at length, I will make an interpretative cut. At first, I am interested in showing how some philosophers and scientists, past and present, discuss the vegetal issue. In a second moment, I will comment on the way in which some modern and contemporary writers expose an innovative view of plants, in poems or narratives. I would like to point out that, in contemporary Brazilian society, it is mainly women poets who have stood out in this different perspective on the vegetal world. And, in a third moment, I will bring a small part of the current conceptions of Brazilian indigenous people about this issue, both in intellectual debates and in the form of a poem. This last stage is where the notion of forest emerges with all force, which gives full life to vegetal thinking, becoming almost synonymous with it. Alternatively, to speak Fernando Pessoa’s world: forest, in my reflections, is a heteronymous word of vegetal thinking.
I also point out the fact that, at a time when many forests on the planet, especially rain forests or tropical forests, are threatened by fires, predatory exploitation and all kinds of devastation, thinking with and about plants becomes an eminently political and ethical attitude of the utmost relevance. As I argued on a mid-pandemic publication, the survival of practically all species depends on the way we will treat “our sister plants” from this point on.
Botanical renewal and sensitive plant intelligence
“Our sisters plants” is an expression that appears in one of Alberto Caeiro’s poems. What humans lost most was this notion of congenial unity with other living species: animals and plants. Despite the work of Charles Darwin and all the development of biological sciences, especially in the last two centuries, explaining the common origin of not only men and animals, but also of all living species, in the primitive environment unicellular organisms, where life started, we act as if we were divine beings, born ready, as described in Genesis. According to the biblical account, after creating Adam, God gave him the power to name and reign over all other living beings. This divine sovereignty granted to the human made us act in fact as sovereigns, treating other animals as “beasts”. Plants were given an even worse role: because they appeared inert, incapable of any movement other than to grow, they were treated as “half-living”. Not by chance, the verb to vegetate, which in its origin had the positive meaning of “to animate, to enliven; give movement to; increase, strengthen, make it grow”, has, in virtually all Western languages, turned into a synonymous for inertia, morbidity or a state of coma. The positive meaning remains in the Houaiss dictionary, for example, but no one even knows it exists…
In De anima (Peri psychê), Aristotle reviews all the preceding theories of the soul, disqualifying them one by one. Texts by Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus and even his master Plato, among others, are summoned in his argumentation. The richest thing about Aristotelian reflection is that, unlike many other metaphysical tradition thinkers, he does not deny a certain animistic property to plants; only the type of soul they have is not as complete as that of animals and especially that of men: “Among the powers of the soul [psyché], […] in plants there is only the nutritious one, but in other beings, both this and the perceptive one”.
The plant would then be, as the bearer of an incomplete, inferior soul, a life on the edge of existence. This metaphysical prejudice has been addressed in a wealth of ways by the Western tradition. Of course, all animals need plants to extract the energy that keeps them alive, but it’s all just a utilitarian function. Animals are called heterotrophs because they cannot produce their own food through inorganic substances and sunlight. Plants, on the other hand, are called autotrophic because they obtain nutrition through photosynthesis, soil and water substances: they produce, in this way, the organic from the inorganic.
The fact is that the meaning of vegetable living is almost never placed in its full autonomy. Symptomatically, Heidegger, the philosopher who accused Nietzsche of being the last metaphysician, repeats the tenets of the metaphysical tradition by imperatively separating plants and animals from humans, as he states in all writings in Letter on Humanism, addressed to Jean Beaufret: “Among all the beings, the living being is probably the most difficult for us to think about, because it is the one that most resembles us on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is abysmally separated from our ek-sistent essence”. Between us, on one side, and animals and vegetables, on the other, there would then exist an abyss.
In the traditional perspective, plants would lack this sense of mobility inherent to animals, which is already at the “root” of their etymology: the anima that moves us as heterotrophic living beings. When image acceleration cameras were introduced, it was possible to realize that plants move a lot, and the metaphysical prejudice was perpetuated. Reason why they can be put down without remorse: they don’t react because they don’t think or feel properly, and consequently they don’t enjoy full-sense existence.
In 2008, the Swiss Federal Ethical Committee, for the first time in human history, delivered a report entitled “The Dignity of Living Beings Concerning Plants”. As far as it is known, this ethical consideration of the value of plant life was unprecedented. More precisely: the value of any life, regardless of the species or genus to which it belongs. According to scientists, plants represent 85% of the biomass, the remaining 15% are up to animals; human body accounts for less than 1% of this last percentage … If, by a natural catastrophe, all plants suddenly disappeared from the face of the Earth, animals would die in a few months: from lack of oxygen and above all from lack of food.
Philosopher Michael Marder explains very clearly what I would call a vegetal gift:
Vegetal life dynamizes [enlivens, vivifies, animates] plants as much as, in different ways, animals and human beings; life in common in its maximum simplicity is in equal measure an end-in-itself and a vitality source for us. An offense against plant life harms both the plants we destroy and something of the plant being/existing in us. In addition to annihilating the plants themselves, the highly aggressive extermination of flora, which currently has endangered up to a fifth of all plant species on the planet, impoverishes a vital element in what we call “the human”.
Several scientists, especially in these initial 21st century decades, have been carrying out research on plant intelligence and sensitivity: Francis Hallé, Jean-Marie Pelt, Fleur Daugey, Stefano Mancuso and Anthony Trewavas are among the outstanding. Mancuso, already well translated in Brazil, maintains a laboratory to study what he calls “plant neurobiology”, not to establish a specular relationship with the animals’ biological model, but to demonstrate the complex way in which plant cells have high intelligence and sensitivity standards, interacting all the time with the environment where they live:
The most recent studies have shown that [plants] are boost sensitivity, communicate with each other and with animals, sleep, memorize data and are even capable of manipulating other species. In addition, they rightfully deserve the label of intelligent. Their root apparatus develops uninterruptedly, with the help of countless command centers that combine to guide them in a collective brain-like manner, or rather, with distributed intelligence, which grows and develops assimilating capital information to their nutrition and survival.
Recent advances in biology make it possible today to see plants as organisms endowed with a well-established faculty to acquire, store, share and use information taken from their environment. Vegetal neurobiology main research fields intend to unveil the way these brilliant creatures provide and transform themselves in order to adopt a coherent behavior.
What plants really think and, above all, what they think of us, we will never know. The experience of otherness is, by definition, inaccessible; one can only guess, without any certainty. But there is no longer any doubt about the fact that they are also thinking living beings: with the characteristics of their species and their respective languages, they intelligently interpret existing in the world, in order to guarantee their own survival and that of many other inhabitants of Earth.
Phytoliterature: the thinking literature and literature in a broader sense
Alberto Caeiro, the aforementioned heteronym of Fernando Pessoa, in his long poem The Keeper of Sheep, elaborates a sophisticated critical reflection on the human metaphysical view towards plants, which he considers to be sisters. It is all based on the mistake of thinking that, when naming a tree, a fruit or a flower, for example, we know them. For him, this is no more than a mere conceptual abstraction, since “To think of a flower is to see it and smell it / And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning”. His vegetal thinking (the way he thinks plants) is entirely sensory, the opposite of what the Western philosophical tradition has proposed until recently.
Reason why Nature, with a capital letter, for Caeiro does not exist, but is a mere invention of humans, who bear verbal language as a falsification instrument, producing abstractions:
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature does not exist,
That there are hills, valleys, plains,
That there are trees, flowers, herbs,
That there are rivers and rocks,
But there is no whole that they belong to,
That a real and true ensemble
Is a distortion from our ideas.
In Clarice Lispector’s fiction, the reader finds the same tendency of relating vegetables in a different way, elaborating a sophisticated phytoliterature: phyto (from the Greek phytón, “vegetable, tree, plant; descendant, offspring”) and literature. It is curious that many of the critics who read Clarice’s work addressed the animal issue, but the vegetal theme is practically ignored, with few exceptions. I was probably the first to do it more systematically in Clarice Lispector: A Thinking Literature, in which two sections propose this type of reading: “The aesthetics of sensitives” and “The denature of flowers”. The fact that critics ignores the Claritian plants as a full problem is structural: our anthropocentric gaze always turns to what most resembles us: animals, as most of them have eyes, mouths, snouts, ears, limbs and organs analogous to ours.
Among many vegetal narratives in Lispector, the best known is undoubtedly the tale “Amor”. It’s the story of a housewife who feels disturbed to see herself in a blind man chewing gum at the tram stop, going to Rio de Janeiro’s Botanical Garden, where she has an experience of absolute estrangement:
Around him there were quiet noises, the smell of trees, small surprises among the vines. The entire Garden was crushed by the hurried afternoon moments. Where did the half-dream she was surrounded by come from? As if by a buzz of bees and birds. Everything was weird, too soft, too big.
But the vegetable book par excellence is Água viva. The reader is explicitly invited to “move to the new realm”, where everything comes in the form of pictures and visions, as the narrator is both painter and writer: “I want to paint a rose”. In this sense, she describes many flowers (bird of paradise, geranium, edelweiss, water lily, carnation, sunflower and others), displaying a verbal forest: “I enter slowly into writing as I have already entered into painting. It’s a tangled world of vines, syllables, honeysuckle, colors and words”. Água Viva depicts floral eruptions, spreading colors, aromas and textures to all sides, in close contact with nature that becomes culture, and vice versa. This temporary plant-world vastness suspension of limits between the natural and cultural universe is the most powerful effect of poetic and sensitive aesthetics, a forest of sensations handover. Above all, the anonymous narrator herself breaks the barriers between the human and the vegetable: in this fictional “core” comes “the strange impression that I do not belong to the human race”, transmutation or interchange with the vegetable kingdom taking place several times: “I am a tree that burns with hard pleasure” and “My impulse is linked to that of tree roots”.
In 20th century Brazilian literature there are several examples of the textual importance of plants: among others, cocoa in Jorge Amado, flowers in Cecília Meireles, sugar cane in João Cabral de Melo Neto and José Lins do Rego, the buriti [moriche palm] and all the vegetation of the sertão [hinterland] in Guimarães Rosa, the metaphorical (but also real) “rose of people” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, the cactus by Manuel Bandeira. In contemporary literature, Ferreira Gullar wrote a beautiful poem about “A planta”, and others about “rotten bananas”, in addition to “Relva verde relva” [Green herbage] and “Uma corola”. Edimilson de Almeida Pereira has, among others, a dense poem entitled “Verde visto do alto” [Green seen from above]. Leonardo Fróes, a poet linked to the environment he lives in, the mountainous region of Petrópolis, authors the poem “Algumas variações culturais” [Some cultural variations], which mixes nature and culture, rather than opposing their instances. Sérgio Medeiros formulates nonsense poetry in O sexo vegetal [Vegetable sex], and chlorophyll references appear in several of his books. But women poets stand out above all, as if a certain being-woman-in-the-world enabled this plant connection inherent to phytoliterature: Adélia Prado has poems dedicated to the plant world, Cláudia Roquette-Pinto published the award-winning Corola, Josely Vianna Baptista organized a beautiful Roça Barroca [Baroque field], with translation of traditional Guarani Cantos [Chants] and authorial flower poems, Adriana Lisboa recently released O vivo [The living], where flowers flourish against excessive symbolism, Julia Hansen has already inscribed plants in two of her titles (Romã e Seiva, veneno ou fruto) [Pomegranate and Sap, poison or fruit], Katia Maciel wrote Plantio [Planting] and Ana Martins Marques dedicated an entire book to jardins [gardens], where this, among other germinations, stands out:
I don’t know the name
of the plants
But I also don’t know the name
of most of my neighbors
Unlike people
the plants don’t care
I don’t address them by name
but also actually
I don’t address them
They ask for nothing and never complain
sometimes lose a lot of leaves or just,
and in silence, die
They are always changing
never
move
We are
for now
on this body
In principle, the anonymity of the plants is exposed. Although all species that have made themselves known gain scientific and/or popular designations, vegetables are never individually named, at least not in our Western cultures. This is due to the fact that they, unlike animals, are hardly ever perceived as true individuals, much less as “subjects” or “people”. Dogs and cats, as well as wild animals in domestic or public imprisonment, are even named after people: in addition to the classic Rex, the hilarious Pluto, the famous Knut (Berlin zoo star who met a tragic fate in the first decade of this century), you can find Igor, Katy, Max, Susana, Tião [Sebastião] (famous monkey from the Rio zoo, now deceased) etc. as names to our “specific companions” (to remember Donna Haraway’s “companion species”).
For us, an avocado tree or a cabbage tree represent their species and not themselves individually. To this, plants respond with the most absolute indifference, while cats and in special dogs are always attentive to what they are called. This silence of the plants (at least to our ears, because deep down the sap flow in the trunk and branches does produce some sound, inaudible to us though) is a brand of the vegetable kingdom and, as much as the apparent immobility, helped to form the stereotype that they only “vegetate”, in a negative sense, being closer, therefore, to the inert realm of stones (of which immobility is also only apparent). As we have seen, this is false and serves as an argument for lowering plants from the perspective of humans and other animals. In any case, in the second-to-last stanza, by the double meaning of the transitive and pronominal verb mudar(-se) (change and move), the supposed immobility of plants is paradoxically questioned and affirmed (“They are always changing / never / move”); that is, every season they change their outer look, not apparently moving (which is untrue for they love to migrate, and this can occur through seedlings or scattered seeds, for example).
One of the strongest components of the poem is, in fact, a certain lack of communication between plants and us: although cultivated and modified by the human species, they remain in their enigmatic muteness, challenging our arrogant sovereignty. And so, “We are / for now / on this body”: it is because of this interspecific lack of communication that plants remain “standing” [by their stem or trunk] like guava, açaí, apple or any other tasty fruit. A well highlighted otherness on another poem from the same collection by Marques, which speaks of a tree that always bloomed, regardless of what happened around the world: “It always bloomed / every year / indifferent to events”.
Fernando Pessoa, Clarice Lispector, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and all the authors mentioned do what I call thinking literature: one that allows us to think the not-yet-thought of and even the Western metaphysical tradition unthinkable. For example, our relationship with plants, which is quite different from indigenous and Afro-descendant cultures in Brazil. This union of letter to vegetable universe literary thinking corresponds to what is now called literature in an expanded sense: no longer fiction, drama, essay or poem in conventional tradition, but literary text connecting to universes far beyond the human. The expression that I forged in 1995 for a thinking literature or writing permits its own grafting into this contemporary literature in a broader sense.
Indigenous thoughts: forest is the world
If there are cultures related to vegetation, they are those of native peoples in the Americas. In particular, the indigenous peoples of the territory now designated “Brazil”, and who had been here long before the Portuguese invasion in the 16th century. So the Amazon, for example, has its current outline largely due to human intervention, but without the destructive aspect of Portuguese exploration and colonization.
In a text that addresses the complex relationships between human species and plant species in the Amazon over the centuries, Laura Pereira Furquim explains how the forest’s biodiversity is not only due to endogenous factors, but also relied on human participation very early on. The multiple of social ties within and between ethnic groups reflects on biodiversity resulting from varied crops, rather than the tedious and harmful monoculture. Socially speaking, as well as regarding plant cultivation, openness to the other and incessant crossings are a source of wealth and preserve life.
Ailton Krenak, Sônia Guajajara, Davi Kopenawa, Sandra Benites Guarani, Daniel Munduruku, João Paulo Barreto (Tukano), among many others, are indigenous people of different ethnic groups who have been offering an understanding of the plant universe that is completely different from philosophical thought. Hegel is explicitly anthropocentric when, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, he resources to botanical metaphors to speak of the phenomenological path of the Spirit (Geist) until it overcomes the contingent limits of existence through sublimation (Aufhebung): “Everything that is human is only human insofar as thought is in action; it can appear as it pleases; human it is only thanks to thought. It is only because of this that man is distinguished from the animal”. This is the basic speciesist argument, which underlies all prejudice against other species: unlike what some non-Western religions conceive, in Christian-based civilizations only Man was made in the image of God, and therefore his existence has absolute priority in relation to other living beings: “The priority of man, image of God, over animal and plant will state in itself and for itself”.
Ailton Krenak, belonging to the ethnic group indicated by his surname, became one of the most important voices for the environmental issue in Brazil, especially during the covid-19 pandemic period, which began in March 2020. The indigenous population has made several public interventions, through interviews, lectures, debates and books.
One of the keenest ideas of the thinker Krenak concerns the concept of “humanity”. His main criticism is towards the tendency, especially in Western cultures, to separate humans from all other “beings” or, as I prefer to say, from all other living beings and things, consequently detaching them from the rest of the planet and inventing a world for themselves. In the context of the pandemic, his statements reach maximum power:
We have to abandon anthropocentrism; there is a lot of life beyond us, we are not lacking in biodiversity. On the contrary. From an early age, we learn that there are lists of endangered species. As these lists grow, humans proliferate, destroying forests, rivers and animals. We are worse than covid-19. This package called humanity is being absolutely peeled off from this organism that is the Earth, living in a civilizational abstraction that suppresses diversity, denies the plurality of forms of life, existence and habits.
Words that find full echo in those of Davi Kopenawa, who has gifted us his vast and sensitive experience as a shaman in a book, which we should bring to our daily life, in order to shake our abstract and prejudiced contact with plants and the other living ones. A long quote, which expresses a whole poetic and aesthetic of indigenous existence:
The trees in the forest and the plants in our gardens do not grow alone either, as the whites think. Our forest is vast and beautiful. But it is not for nothing. Its fertility worth makes it that way. It’s what we call në rope. Nothing would grow without it. The rope comes and goes, like a visitor, making the vegetation grow wherever it goes. When we drink yãkoana, we see its image that permeates the forest and makes it moist and fresh. The tree leaves appear green and shiny and their branches are laden with fruit. We also see a lot of rasa si peach palm covered with heavy fruit bunches, hanging at the bottom of their thorny trunks, and huge banana and sugarcane plantations. This land fertility worth is enabled everywhere. It makes the richness of the forest sprout and, in this way, feeds humans and game. It makes all the plants and fruits that we eat come out of the earth. It bears the name of everything that thrives, both in the fields and in the forest.
The fertility of the soil provides the robust vegetation, which sustains itself, at the same time feeding animals and humans equally, as only thriving plants can do. This shamanic knowledge, provided by a fine vision of the forest, should be transmitted to new generations of Brazilians and other nationalities, as a gifted heritage that would help us build other relationships with the plant, animal and mineral universe as a whole. We would no longer limit ourselves to thinking of human and other lives as mere instruments of utility in contemporary hyper-capitalist production.
Plants are ubiquitous because life as we know would not exist without them: discreet, silent and sometimes invisible, they are everywhere, like the sertão of Guimarães Rosa, feeding us and protecting the multiple forms of life on the planet. So the vast majority of living animals (humans and non-humans) depend on plants, making the Earth a great virtual forest. If for Hélio Oiticica, “museum is the world”, for the vegetal thinking that I defend, Forest is the world.
The concept of forest is essentially interactive: everything is connected, everything is shareable, and these common spaces provided by our sister plants must be cultivated. The great mistake of modernity was to have labeled knowledge stems, with no concern about making them communicate with each other. Autonomy (human and other) can only be full if fertilized and grafted into by heteronomy: things are defined also or above all by what it is not, by the other, the different. Forest is the world and the world is relationship. And literature represents the forest seamlessly, starting with the book that has sustained it for centuries. As beautiful poem “Liber” by Ana Martins Marques, included in this collection, says: “Books / were once / trees // collecting the sun and the rain / and giving shelter / to passing birds”.
At a time when human population is suffering the consequences of a pandemic, certainly caused by itself, the words of the indigenous leader Sonia Guajajara act as a solidarity call:
People have to rethink their ways of consumption, they have to understand that individualism needs to end, that we have to adopt collective ways of doing things, strengthening types of networking. And, above all, assume responsibility in this struggle to change the economic development model, this model that urgently needs to be halted, and only we indigenous people or environmentalists will not be able to put this pressure on for this change to happen. […] For this, more collective struggles, more political and ecological awareness, understanding that it is necessary to establish another connection, or a reconnection with mother earth, and understand exactly that it is mother earth that assures nourishment and life on the planet.
This is what I have defended, in interchange with Derrida’s thinking, as solidarity of all living beings, and not just human solidarity. For we are all inhabitants of a vast world forest, currently in the course of destruction, because of the species considered the most sovereign of all: that of the unwise Homo sapiens sapiens.
The vegetal topic has to do with political oppression: of the living beings, plants are the most vulnerable, because their self-defense mechanisms are much less agile than those of animals. The time of the vegetables is different, alien to the rush of those who say they are full of “heart”, but who depend on plants to survive, as they need the oxygen they release into the atmosphere and feed on the leaves, fruits and vegetables they produce. So individuals identified with the LGBTQIAP+ cause, women, African descendants, indigenous peoples and oppressed ethnic groups such as Kurds and Palestinians are potential allies of the plants. Nor should we forget the workers in general, nor even the less favored middle class sectors. Right now people are losing rights all over the world because of ultraliberalism, it is necessary that all progressive agendas, that is, those placed left on the political spectrum, be brought together under the same struggle. The slogan would no longer be “workers of the whole world, unite”, but rather “oppressed of the whole world, unite!”. Unite under forest protection!
I conclude with a phytopoetic quote from the beautiful “Amazon Soneto” by the indigenous Yaguarê Yamã:
On the white Arawá waters
Ygara that glides calmly
Between branches – araçá reeds
In the nearly absent golden reflection.
The love for plants, which these literary texts demonstrate, is truthfully different from the contempt for forests practiced by many governments across the globe, especially ours – this is what I call phytophobia: horror of the vegetal. The “strange institution called literature” is one of the most powerful discourses to make the world flourish more and more, greening it.
Evando Nascimento is a writer, university professor, essayist and visual artist. He taught at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora and at the Université Stendhal de Grenoble. In the 1990s, he was a student of Jacques Derrida at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Sarah Kofman at the Sorbonne. In 2007, he did a post-doctorate in philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. He has given courses and lectures at various institutions such as Uso, Manchester University and PUC-Valparaiso.
He has published, among others: Derrida e a literatura (É Realizações, 3rd ed., translated in Argentina by La Cebra), Clarice Lispector: uma literatura pensante (Civilização Brasileira) and, with texts by him and Derrida, La solidarité des vivants et le pardon (Hermann), in addition to O pensamento vegetal: literatura e plantas (Civilização Brasileira). He has also published five fiction books, including Retrato desnatural and Cantos do Mundo (finalist of the Portugal Telecom Award), both published by Record, A desordem das inscrições (7 Letras) Diários de Vincent: impressões do estrangeiro (Circuito). Website: http://www.eandonascimento.net.br/.
Notes
1 This essay is inevitably an offshoot of my book O pensamento vegetal: a literatura e as plantas (Civilização Brasileira, 2021). In it, I approach the vegetal issue from the point of view of literature, also having, from end to end, philosophy and the sciences as the guiding threads; the arts also come in as a reflective example.
2 Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida. A visão das plantas. São Paulo: Todavia, 2021.
3 Evando Nascimento. Notas sobre o coronavírus e a sobrevivência das espécies. In: Peter Pal Pélbart (org.). Pandemia crítica. São Paulo: N-1, Sesc, 2021, p. 197-204.
4 Alberto Caeiro. O guardador de rebanhos. In: Fernando Pessoa. Obra poética. Sel., org. and notes Maria Aliete Galhoz. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1983, p. 149.
5 La bête et le souverain [The beast and the sovereign] is the title of two posthumous volumes by Jacques Derrida, edited from his last seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris: Jacques Derrida. Séminaire la bête et le souverain: v. I (2001-2002). Org. and notes Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud. Paris: Galilée, 2008; and Séminaire la bête et le souverain: v. II (2002-2003). Org. and notes Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud. Paris: Galilée, 2010.
6 All etymologies were taken from the UOL-Houaiss Online Dictionary. Available at: https://houaiss.uol.com.br/pub/apps/www/v3-0/html/index.htm#3. Access on 21 May 2021.
7 Aristóteles. De anima. Trad., apr. and notes Maria Cecília Gomes dos Reis. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2017, p. 77.
8 Martin Heidegger. Letter on humanism. In: Marcas do caminho. Translation Enio Paulo Giachini and Ernildo Stein. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2008, p. 338.
9 Michael Marder. Plant-thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 182. (Unless otherwise stated, all translations are by me.)
10 Mancuso, 2018, p. 208-209.
11 Alberto Caeiro. O guardador de rebanhos, op. cit., p. 146.
12 Id., p. 160.
13 Evando Nascimento. Clarice Lispector: uma literatura pensante. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2012.
14 Clarice Lispector. Laços de família. 12. ed. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1982, p. 23.
15 Clarice Lispector. Água viva. Edition with unpublished manuscripts and essays. Org. Pedro Karp Vasquez. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2019, p. 64.
16 Id., p. 31.
17 Id., p. 42, 50 e 53, respectively.
18 Ana Martins Marques. O livro dos jardins. São Paulo: Quelônio, 2019, p. 10.
19 Donna Haraway. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. In: Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016, p. 91-198.
20 Ana Martins Marques. O livro dos jardins, op. cit., p. 20.
21 Laura Pereira Furquim. O acúmulo das diferenças: nota arqueológica sobre a relação entre sócio e biodiversidade na Amazônia Antiga. In: Joana Cabral de Olveira et al. Vozes vegetais: diversidade, resistências e histórias da floresta. São Paulo: Ubu, 2020, p. 125-39.
22 Hegel. Introdução à história da filosofia. Translation Heloisa da Graça Burati. 2nd printing. São Paulo: Rideel, 2005, p. 60.
23 Id., p. 37.
24 Ailton Krenak. A vida não é útil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020, p. 81-82. My highlights. See also: Krenak: Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. 5th printing. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019.
25 Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami. Editor Bruce Albert. Translation Beatriz Perrone-Moisés. 2nd printing. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016, p. 207.
26 Katia Marko and Fabiana Reinholz. Sônia Guajajara comemora a liderança das mulheres indígenas na luta por direitos. Brasil de Fato, 9 jun. 2020. Available at: https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2020/06/09/povos-indigenas-vivem-momento-traumatico-afirma-sonia-guajajara. Access on Sep. 20, 2021.
27 Yaguarê Yamã. Soneto amazônico. In: Beatriz Azevedo (org.). Poesia indígena hoje. Poesia.org., Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2020. p. 85. Available at: https://www.p-o-e-s-i-a.org/dossies/?fbclid=IwAR2e1uvZH0LmOczVa1xQSrWpktJGpB3eulLLsOKFwvf0hzWXy64eVNFDEpA. Access on 20 Sep. 2021.